Pipeline commands
Apothem pipeline command reference — the /plan flow and audit command catalog.
Apothem ships an architecture-aware /plan pipeline, a thirteen-stage
/research pipeline, plus an eleven-command audit sequence — giving every
project a structured path from raw prose to production-grade,
multi-axis-reviewed code, and from a raw idea to a disseminated, peer-reviewed
paper.
Pipeline overview
flowchart LR
accTitle: Plan pipeline command flow
accDescr: Left-to-right flowchart of the apothem plan pipeline from the spec stage through the generate and review stages, then through a conditional architecture-bearing decision that either runs the design stage or skips directly to the execute stage. The orthogonal audit stage wraps the spec-through-review span as a closed remediation loop, and the re-entrant amend stage revises an existing suite and returns it to review.
A[/plan-spec] --> B[/plan-generate]
B --> C[/plan-review]
AUD[/plan-audit<br/>orthogonal: wraps spec → review] -.->|closed-loop remediation| A
AM[/plan-amend<br/>re-entrant: revises an existing suite] -.->|re-review| C
C --> Q{Architecture-bearing suite?}
Q -->|yes| F[/plan-design<br/>emit _inputs/design.md]
Q -->|no| D[/plan-execute]
F --> D
D --> E[/plan-status]
D --> G[Audit review sequence]
G --> H[Completion milestone]The planning stages
The pipeline ships as eight first-class slash commands, one per stage — each
independently invocable as /plan-<stage>. The /plan
orchestrator drives them from a mission to an executed suite.
| Stage | Role | Position |
|---|---|---|
| /plan-spec | Forge — prose to spec | Head |
| /plan-generate | Generator — spec to plan suite | Mid-chain |
| /plan-review | Auditor — forensic plan audit | Mid-chain |
| /plan-design | Architect — _inputs/design.md for architecture-bearing suites | Conditional gate |
| /plan-execute | Executor — phase execution | Terminal |
| /plan-status | Reporter — read-only status | Read-only |
| /plan-audit | Guardian — closed-loop wrap of spec → generate → review | Orthogonal (pre-execute) |
| /plan-amend | Steward — re-entrant amendment of an existing suite | Re-entrant |
/plan-audit is orthogonal to the linear flow, not a stage within it. It wraps
/plan-spec → /plan-generate → /plan-review as a single closed loop, runs only
the missing upstream stages, actively remediates findings, and leaves the suite
ready for /plan-execute. It is distinct from the audit review sequence below,
which audits an executed codebase rather than a plan suite.
/plan-design is not a universal ceremony. /plan-review classifies whether
the suite changes architecture-bearing surfaces. If yes, /plan-design emits
the design trace that /plan-execute and /architecture-review consume. If no,
the reviewed suite moves directly into execution.
The research pipeline
The research pipeline ships as thirteen first-class slash commands, one per
stage — each independently invocable as /research-<stage>, chained by a
Sequence Gate and a Handoff Manifest, under ten rigor mandates (authoritative
sources, reproducibility, falsifiability, citation integrity, preregistration,
ethics / conflicts, statistical rigor, open-science / FAIR, reporting-guideline
conformance, theoretical grounding / impact).
flowchart LR
accTitle: Research pipeline command flow
accDescr: Left-to-right flowchart of the apothem research pipeline from the ideate stage through spec, theory, sources, synthesis, proposal, study design, experiment, analysis, paper, and peer review to publish and disseminate, with a revision loop from review back to paper.
RI[/research-ideate] --> RS[/research-spec]
RS --> RT[/research-theory]
RT --> RSO[/research-sources]
RSO --> RSY[/research-synthesis]
RSY --> RPR[/research-proposal]
RPR --> RD[/research-design]
RD --> RE[/research-experiment]
RE --> RA[/research-analysis]
RA --> RP[/research-paper]
RP --> RR[/research-review]
RR --> RPU[/research-publish]
RPU --> RDI[/research-disseminate]
RR -.->|revision loop| RP| Stage | Role | Position |
|---|---|---|
| /research-ideate | Formulate the problem — candidate questions from a domain seed | Head |
| /research-spec | Frame the question — falsifiable hypotheses + scope | Mid-chain |
| /research-theory | Conceptual framework + theory-of-change | Mid-chain |
| /research-sources | Systematic source collection with a re-runnable search record | Mid-chain |
| /research-synthesis | SOTA map + gap analysis | Mid-chain |
| /research-proposal | Objectives + feasibility + contingencies + impact + data plan + preregistration plan; funder-call matrix or resubmission response | Mid-chain |
| /research-design | Study design + preregistration | Mid-chain |
| /research-experiment | Run + record, reproducible | Mid-chain |
| /research-analysis | Results + statistics | Mid-chain |
| /research-paper | Top-tier paper draft | Mid-chain |
| /research-review | Peer-review-grade critique | Mid-chain |
| /research-publish | Venue package + submission | Mid-chain |
| /research-disseminate | Dissemination + impact + FAIR archival | Terminal |
The /research wrapped-workflow orchestrator drives these stages from raw
question to published paper (it is not itself a stage), checking each stage's
output independently before the next stage builds on it; --quick runs
/research-sources + /research-synthesis only for a single-shot cited report.
The empirical stages (sources, design, experiment, analysis) and the writing stages (paper, review, publish, disseminate) additionally draw on operationalizing rigor surfaces — fair multi-method comparison, comparator provenance, an experiment-program scaffold, a compute-utilization plan, an opt-in autonomous experiment loop, a definition-of-done advancement gate, blinding with staged disclosure, a search record, study allocation and power planning, analysis discipline, plan contingencies, figure integrity, and talk and poster planning — that add operational detail to the ten mandates without extending them.
Audit review sequence
The /audit wrapped-workflow orchestrator sweeps all eleven dimensions below as a single parallel pass — the audit-fortress analogue of /plan and /research — synthesizing one deduplicated, severity-triaged findings report (report-only; remediation routes to /elevate). Each dimension is also individually invocable.
The /fortress wrapped-workflow orchestrator closes the loop /audit reports: it detects through /audit, verifies each finding, remediates every survivor at its owning surface, re-audits in a bounded loop, and gates the result through /release-readiness — the production-hardening analogue of /plan and /research.
| Command | Quality area |
|---|---|
| /code-review | Code quality |
| /code-audit | Code corpus |
| /security-audit | OWASP / ASVS |
| /perf-audit | Performance |
| /architecture-review | Architecture |
| /ux-review | Developer experience |
| /a11y-audit | Accessibility |
| /docs-review | Documentation |
| /dependency-audit | Dependencies |
| /supply-chain-audit | Supply chain |
| /threat-model-audit | Threat model |
All commands
Every shipped command, generated from its definition under
src/apothem/commands/. Commands without a hand-written page get a page
generated from the same definition.
| Command | Summary |
|---|---|
| /plan | Runs the planning pipeline (spec, generate, review, design) with independent verification, confirming at each hand-off; execute stays a manual step the … |
| /plan-spec | Turns free-form prose, notes or rough requirements into a spec-grade _spec/spec.md that keeps the author's wording and settles open questions by inquiry. |
| /plan-generate | Generates a full plan suite (master plan, progress log, decision notes, per-phase files) from a written spec or raw prose. |
| /plan-review | Reads an existing plan suite line by line for fidelity, consistency, completeness and risk, then applies only the revisions the user approves. |
| /plan-design | Writes the architectural design for a reviewed plan suite at _inputs/design.md: components, interfaces, decisions and diagrams. |
| /plan-execute | Use to implement one phase of a reviewed plan suite: reads the phase file and progress notes, verifies prerequisites and review scorecards, implements each … |
| /plan-amend | Changes an existing plan suite without losing resolved decisions, re-deriving only the affected spec, phases and notes. |
| /plan-audit | Audits a plan suite across spec, generate and review, then fixes findings in a loop without per-revision approval until none remain or the cap is hit. |
| /plan-status | Reports plan-suite progress from its tracking files across tasks, phases and artifacts, read-only. |
| /research | Runs the research pipeline from idea to peer-reviewed paper, verifying each stage hand-off and halting before data collection or publication. |
| /research-ideate | Finds a research question from zero by scanning opportunities, gaps, and invalidated hypotheses, then ranking candidates. |
| /research-spec | Frames a research question or notes into a testable spec: falsifiable hypotheses, inclusion and exclusion scope, success metrics. |
| /research-theory | Builds the conceptual framework for a framed research question: theory of change, constructs with operational definitions and a conceptual-model diagram. |
| /research-sources | Collects and screens the literature for a ratified research spec: deduplication, ranking and extraction with provenance. |
| /research-synthesis | Reconciles collected sources into a state-of-the-art map, a literature matrix and a research-gap statement. |
| /research-proposal | Turns a research gap and theoretical framework into a fundable proposal: SMART aims, feasibility, risk register with contingencies, impact pathway, data … |
| /research-design | Turns a synthesized research gap into testable predictions, a study design and a frozen preregistration. |
| /research-experiment | Runs the preregistered study protocol and records raw data with provenance: experiment log, data, and reproducibility manifest (environment, seed, version … |
| /research-analysis | Runs the preregistered statistical analysis on collected data: effect sizes with confidence intervals, multiple-comparison correction, robustness checks, … |
| /research-paper | Assembles a paper draft from the synthesis, study design, and analysis, with every citation checked to resolve. |
| /research-review | Hostile peer review of a paper, from a research suite or a supplied PDF or text: scores novelty, rigor, reproducibility, ethics; ranks revisions. |
| /research-publish | Builds the venue submission package for a reviewed paper: template formatting, cover letter, data and code availability statement, ethics and conflict … |
| /research-disseminate | Plans post-acceptance dissemination and impact: preprint announcement, FAIR data and code archive, altmetrics tracking, rebuttal loop. |
| /audit | Sweeps a repository across all eleven review dimensions in one multi-agent run and returns one verified, severity-ranked report; it never fixes anything. |
| /a11y-audit | Audits rendered pages of a web surface against WCAG 2.2 AA and reports severity-ranked findings per page, without fixing anything. |
| /architecture-review | Reviews a repository against its design document and layer rules, reporting boundary violations, coupling and wiring gaps as ranked findings. |
| /code-audit | Cross-file forensic audit: hidden coupling, type-hint gaps, coverage holes, dead and duplicate code. |
| /code-review | Reviews source files one at a time for readability, naming, complexity, idiom fit and comment quality, and reports severity-ranked findings without editing. |
| /dependency-audit | Audits direct and transitive dependencies for known vulnerabilities, license conflicts, deprecation and loose pins, ranking findings per dependency. |
| /docs-review | Reviews documentation pages for prose clarity, broken links, code-block tags, citations and public-API coverage, reporting severity-ranked findings per page. |
| /perf-audit | Audits an Apothem installation's per-class budgets (hooks, ecosystem verification, conformity gate, tests, agents, shell, lint) with its benchmark drivers, … |
| /security-audit | Audits a repository's security posture: secrets, injection, unsafe deserialization, path traversal, vulnerable dependencies. |
| /supply-chain-audit | Audits a repository's release pipeline: build provenance, artifact signing, SBOM completeness, pinned CI actions and minimum permissions. |
| /threat-model-audit | Threat-models a repository with STRIDE per element and trust boundaries, classifying actors and rating residual risk. |
| /ux-review | Reviews a repository's developer experience from a first-time user's view: CLI ergonomics, error messages, install flow and docs discoverability. |
| /fortress | Hardens a repository end to end: runs the audit sweep, verifies each finding, remediates survivors through the surgical-guard, secret-rotation and vuln-triage … |
| /elevate | Whole-repository elevation: runs the audit sweep, then critiques naming, structure, storytelling and extensibility, remediates what it finds (deletions are … |
| /eval | Runs one evaluation campaign for a language model or prompt: scores each output over a dataset and reports metrics by category plus regressions against a … |
| /freshify | Use when a repository must be made fresh and release-clean: purges caches and stale artifacts, removes legacy narrative and back-references, normalizes file … |
| /github-deploy-fresh | Use when a GitHub repository needs one clean first release on origin/main: a single v0.1.0 release commit, green workflow cards, a first-version changelog, and … |
| /github-deploy-next | Use to run the next release cycle on a GitHub repository: merge ready pull requests, resolve the issues the release addresses, derive the SemVer bump from … |
| /projectify | Builds the Description, Instruction and knowledge files for a chat-app Project or custom assistant through guided questions, within the platform's context … |
| /release-readiness | Pre-release gate sweep: use before shipping a repository to check lint, format, types, tests, dependency and supply-chain risk, visibility surfaces, changelog … |
| /test-suite | Authors and runs behavior-first tests for a repository, triages failures and reports coverage gaps on critical paths. |
| /workflow | Use to run a non-trivial mission as an independent multi-agent workflow: parallel subagents under named return contracts, refute-by-default verification of … |